Founders Second Amendment or The Essential Barack Obama

Founders' Second Amendment: The Origins of the Right to Bear Arms

Author: Stephen P Halbrook

"Recent years have seen a sea change in scholarly interpretation of the Second Amendment. Beginning in the 1960s, a revisionist view emerged that individuals had a "right" to bear arms only in militia service - in other words, a limited, collective right. But in the late 1980s a handful of scholars began producing an altogether persuasive analysis that changed thinking on the issue, so that today, even in canonical textbooks, bearing arms is acknowledged as an individual right." "Stephen P. Halbrook's The Founders' Second Amendment is the first book-length account of the origins of this key element of the Bill of Rights, based on the Founders' own statements as revealed in newspapers, correspondence, debates, and resolutions. Dr. Halbrook investigates the period from 1768 to 1826, from the last years of British rule and the American Revolution through to the adoption of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and the passing of the Founders' generation. His book offers the most comprehensive analysis of the arguments behind the drafting and adoption of the Second Amendment, and the intentions of the men who created it." With the question of the right to bear arms a cornerstone issue before the United States Supreme Court, The Founders' Second Amendment could scarcely be more timely and important.

Publishers Weekly

The U.S. Supreme Court's recent hearing of arguments in District of Columbiav. Heller—which may overturn the capital's ban on handguns—signals a general re-evaluation of the Second Amendment. The trend is toward an unlimited individual right rather than a restricted, collective one applying only to government militias. Halbrook, a research fellow at the Independent Institute in California, is firmly of the former school and investigates the nature of the ideas underlying the Second Amendment during the Revolutionary generation (between 1768 and 1826). How did the founders regard the issue of gun control? What prompted them to define the right to bear arms as fundamental, second only to freedom of speech? Basing his research on contemporary newspapers, political resolutions and private correspondence, Halbrook delves deeply into the importance of firearms during the Revolution, finding that attempts by search-and-seizure to control the flow of guns was regarded as the typical tyrannical behavior of a standing army. Liberty hinged on free ownership. While readers might disagree with some of Halbrook's historical interpretations, his book should be welcomed as a timely introduction to this most contentious of debates. (June)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Midwest Book Review

The depth and detail added to source material quotes makes this a fine pick for both college and high school collections strong in American history and politics.

New American

The book is an excellent resource for anyone who wants to form a knowledgeable opinion on the meaning, application and reason behind the Second Amendment.

What People Are Saying

FORREST McDONALD
"Stephen Halbrook's The Founders' Second Amendment is first-rate work, utterly convincing. This is a solid and important work."--(FORREST McDONALD, Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of History, University of Alabama)

JOYCE L. MALCOLM
"I enthusiastically recommend Stephen Halbrook's book, The Founder's Second Amendment. This is an original and valuable approach, focusing on the place of individual ownership of firearms during the time of the American Revolution and the drafting and ratification of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. It will add appreciably to the scholarship on the origins and meaning of the Second Amendment."--(JOYCE L. MALCOLM, Professor of Legal History, George Mason University School of Law)

DONALD W. LIVINGSTON
"The Founder's Second Amendment is an impressive achievement. Halbrook shows conclusively to any honest mind, both in respect to historical evidence and analytical jurisprudence, that the Framers intended the Second Amendment not as the reserved right of a State government to organize a militia, but of the people as individuals to keep and to bear arms. In this meticulously researched and exhaustive study, Halbrook has produced what promises to be the standard work for years to come on the original intent of the Second Amendment. It will be an invaluable resource for scholars of the Constitution."--(DONALD W. LIVINGSTON, Professor of Philosophy, Emory University)

GLENN HARLAN REYNOLDS
"Stephen Halbrook's The Founders' Second Amendment is crisply written, rich with history, and sure to be valuable to anyone interested in understanding the original meaning of the Second Amendment's right to bear arms."--(GLENN HARLAN REYNOLDS, Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Tennessee)

NELSON LUND
"Like much of Halbrook's other excellent work, The Founders' Second Amendment is both well-written and full of fascinating details. It will serve as an important resource for professional scholars and interested laypersons. One especially useful aspect of Halbrook's work is that the author so consistently lets a huge variety of original sources speak for themselves."--(NELSON LUND, Patrick Henry Professor of Constitutional Law, George Mason University)

Table of Contents:

Introduction 1

Disarming the Colonists

1 "The Inhabitants to Be Disarmed" 9

2 From the Tea Party to the Powder Alarm 29

3 The Arms Embargo and Search and Seizure at the Neck 58

4 A Shot Heard 'Round the World and "a Cruel Act of Perfidy" 75

Of Revolution and Rights

5 "Times That Try Men's Souls" 111

6 "That the People Have a Right" 126

7 "A Musket to Defend These Rights" 148

The Constitution and Compromise

8 A Constitution with No Bill of Rights? 171

9 The "Dissent of the Minority" 191

10 Virginia Tips the Scales 216

11 "A Majority That Is Irresistible" 234

"To Keep and Bear Their Private Arms"

12 Mr. Madison's Amendments 251

13 The Bill of Rights in the States 279

14 The Great Militia Debate 299

15 Old Founders Never Die, They Just Fade Away 310

Conclusion

16 What Does the Second Amendment Say? 323

Notes 339

Index 393

The Essential Barack Obama: The Grammy Award-Winning Recordings

Author: Barack Obama

A CD collection featuring the best-selling audiobooks, The Audacity of Hope and Dreams from My Father from Grammy® award-winning author, Barack Obama.

The Audacity of Hope

In July 2004, Barack Obama electrified the Democratic National Convention with an address that spoke to Americans across the political spectrum. One phrase in particular anchored itself in listeners' minds, a reminder that for all the discord and struggle to be found in our history as a nation, we have always been guided by a dogged optimism in the future, or what Senator Obama called "the audacity of hope."

Now, in The Audacity of Hope, Senator Obama calls for a different brand of politics-a politics for those weary of bitter partisanship and alienated by the "endless clash of armies" we see in congress and on the campaign trail; a politics rooted in the faith, inclusiveness, and nobility of spirit at the heart of "our improbable experiment in democracy." He explores those forces-from the fear of losing to the perpetual need to raise money to the power of the media-that can stifle even the best-intentioned politician. He also writes, with surprising intimacy and self-deprecating humor, about settling in as a senator, seeking to balance the demands of public service and family life, and his own deepening religious commitment.

At the heart of this book is Senator Obama's vision of how we can move beyond our divisions to tackle concrete problems. He examines the growing economic insecurity of American families, the racial and religious tensions within the body politic, and the transnational threats-from terrorism to pandemic-that gather beyond our shores. And he grapples with therole that faith plays in a democracy-where it is vital and where it must never intrude. Underlying his stories about family, friends, members of the Senate, even the president, is a vigorous search for connection: the foundation for a radically hopeful political consensus.

A senator and a lawyer, a professor and a father, a Christian and a skeptic, and above all a student of history and human nature, Senator Obama has written a book of transforming power. Only by returning to the principles that gave birth to our Constitution, he says, can Americans repair a political process that is broken, and restore to working order a government that has fallen dangerously out of touch with millions of ordinary Americans. Those Americans are out there, he writes-"waiting for Republicans and Democrats to catch up with them."

Dreams from My Father

In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father-a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man-has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey-first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother's family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father's life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.